Chapter XVII: Rudyard Kipling

In the year 1890 people in this country were beginning to tell each other about, and to ask each other about, a young Anglo-Indian storyteller whose works were to be found in a series of pamphlets published by Messrs A. H. Wheeler & Co., of Allahabad, in “The Indian Railway Library.” On inquiry also it was discovered that this same storyteller was the son of an Anglo-Indian official, and that he himself was engaged in the Indian Civil Service, that he had become the laureate of Governmental circles, and that his clever verses had been collected in a volume called _Departmental Ditties_. The demand to know more about this remarkable young man grew until it was found necessary to publish his stories in England.

It was in the year 1890 that the short stories of Rudyard Kipling became accessible to English readers through the normal channels of publication. Thus came to us, bringing with them the scent and heat, the colour and passion of the East in all its splendours and seductiveness, the now world-famous series of short stories, beginning with _Plain Tales from the Hills_, in which we were introduced to the vitriolic Mrs Hawksbee, and _Soldiers Three_, with Privates Stanley Ortheris, John Learoyd and the immortal Terence Mulvaney. These people immediately entered into our consciousness, taking their place beside the great comic figures of fiction, those characters whom we all know so much better than many people we meet in real life. Of a sudden we found ourselves enjoying a largess of short stories such as the English language had not known before. The mere recital of the titles of the little genius-laden volumes issued during that year recalls artistic experiences little short of thrilling--_The Story of the Gadsbys_, _In Black and White_, _Under the Deodars_, _The Phantom ’Rickshaw_, _Wee Willie Winkie_, _The Courting of Dinah Shadd_ and _The City of Dreadful Night_. Then came a long story, _The Light that Failed_, and we realised that this new writer had in him the making of a novelist as well as a great storyteller; a promise, however, not yet achieved. But none who read the _Departmental Ditties_ could have foretold a poet, although the appearance in the Press of occasional verses over the name of Kipling was beginning to make us realise that very shortly it would be necessary to consider some of the new author’s metrical work in the light of poetry; and when, in 1892, a volume called _Barrack Room Ballads and Other Verses_ made its appearance it was as though a bombshell had burst among the seats of literary judgment, and, amidst stimulating shouts of approval, academic criticism was faced with the necessity of revising its idea of poetry, and ultimately of making room for a new poet.

The versatility of Rudyard Kipling did not end there. He proved with such books as _Many Inventions_ (1893), _The Jungle Book_ (1894), _The Second Jungle Book_ (1895), _The Seven Seas_ (1896), _Captains Courageous_ (1897), _The Day’s Work_ (1898), _Stalky & Co._ (1899), and a novel, _The Naulahka_ (1892), written in conjunction with Wolcott Balestier, that he could enter into the minds of sailors and schoolboys and animals, besides giving something very like consciousness to machines, with as much facility as he could enter into the minds of soldiers, Hindoos, and the members of Anglo-Indian Society. Nor did his surprising genius and versatility stop there, for with _Kim_ (1901) he has given us a prose epic of Indian life, and with the _Just-So Stories for Little Children_ (1902) he has entered into the wonder spirit of childhood, just as in _Puck of Pook’s Hill_ (1906), and those remarkable short stories “The Brushwood Boy,” “They,” and the “Finest Story in the World,” he has proved that his genius is equally at home in the realm of fancy and on the borderland of human experience.

_By William Nicholson_]

Everybody felt that a new force in a double sense had come into literature. It was a new voice, a new accent, in many ways a new language, and in every way forceful even to creating an atmosphere of physical violence. Rudyard Kipling was a realist with a difference. He had no antecedents. The critics found it impossible to locate him, even when they admitted that he had earned a definite place in the hierarchy of art. They felt without admitting it, and showed without intending it, that they were, to use that language of the street which Kipling turned into literature, up against a new game. There was over-praise and half-praise, as well as right-down opposition; in short, all the phenomena of the arrival of undoubted genius. Even those in the vanguard of the new movement were lost when they came to consider his work, for as he had no antecedents, so he belonged to no definite movement, neither did he frequent, even when he came to live in England, the places where literary men congregate.

Yet, as we can see now, he was a bigger figure in the vital modernist movement of the Nineties than many who were fonder of using labels to define their position. His was a definite expression of the modern movement towards the revaluation of ideas and life; and, although his temperament was essentially conservative, his interpretation of what finally is a traditional view of life was so fresh and personal that it created the illusion of a revolution. He reasserted the claims of virility and actuality, and, if you like, of vulgarity--that underlying grossness of life which is Nature’s safeguard. In that respect Kipling might well be considered a realist. But his realism never, as in the case of the French realists, looked upon mere frankness as an end in itself. He was never a realist for realism’s sake: he faced facts only because he recognised in them the essentials of romance. When he told a story it was not the outcome of any notion about being an artist, it was the outcome of the oldest of literary traditions, the desire of one man to tell another what he has seen, heard or experienced, and to tell it in the most effective way. His stories, therefore, read like the verbatim reports of the achievements of a gifted raconteur in club or smoking-room, or any other place where men swap yarns; and these stories are equally masculine. They bring the modern clubroom into literature.

His poems sing the song of ordinary healthy manhood in much the same way as folk-songs sang the life of the folk, or, better, as soldier songs, student songs or sailor chanties tell the desires, whims and gossip of men who are thrown together by common circumstances. You feel all the while that the love of the masculine life which is the keynote of _The Light That Failed_ is the underlying and impelling influence of Kipling’s attitude. Whilst Bernard Shaw was using Ibsen to decry the fixed ideals of “the manly man” and “the womanly woman,” Rudyard Kipling was interpreting a new vision of the manly man in some of the most masculine poems that have ever been written, wherein every reference to woman bears the stamp of the oldest attitude of manliness towards womanliness. And in this respect Kipling was nearer the most modern philosophy of the time, that of Nietzsche, than Bernard Shaw. He was no believer in the equality of the sexes; on the contrary, the pugnacious philosophy of Kipling, with its insistence upon clean health and a courageous and dangerous life would make men more like men and women more like women.

Rudyard Kipling was undeniably a protest also against the artistic intellectualism of the time, with its tendency to enclose life in the conservatory of culture; and he was all the more effective as he used his protagonists’ favourite weapons. He knew what he thought and said what he thought in his own way, with as little apology to precedent or convention as the most ultra-realist or impressionist. Everything he did was impressionist, and like all the great figures of his period he did not scruple, when occasion served, to use art as a means of teaching or preaching. He used his art to preach a new imperialistic patriotism as deliberately as Bernard Shaw used art to preach socialism, or John Davidson that gospel of philosophic science to which he devoted his last energies.

As an artist, then, Kipling won his spurs at the outset by writing a cycle of short stories unsurpassed in our literature, and finding their only parallel for bulk of output and high achievement in the stories of Guy de Maupassant. But he differs from the French storyteller in that sex plays only a secondary part in his work. In a period whose artists were over-engaged with the aspects and problems of sex, it was a virtue to show that life had other interests than the way of a man with a maid; and it was no small achievement at such a time to be able to write stories on other subjects which should prove both stimulating and interesting. It was not as though Rudyard Kipling were not conscious of the problem of sex; he knew all about it, but he did not treat it as a problem, he recognised it as a mystery: an inspiration--and a warning. And into the poem called “The Vampire” he put his idea of the tragedy of sexual abandonment:

“A fool there was and he made his prayer
(Even as you and I!)
To a rag and a bone and a hank of hair
(We called her the woman who did not care)
But the fool he called her his lady fair--
(Even as you and I!)”

And one cannot help feeling that Rudyard Kipling has finally stated, through the medium of one of his own soldiers, the average, and perhaps eternal, view of the sex problem, with all its cheerful fatalism, in “The Ladies”:

“I’ve taken my fun where I’ve found it,
An’ now I must pay for my fun,
For the more you ’ave known o’ the others
The less you will settle to one;
An’ the end of it’s settin’ and thinkin’
An’ dreamin’ Hell-fires to see;
So be warned by my lot (which I know you will not)
An’ learn about women from me.”

With the concluding dictum that--

“... the Colonel’s Lady an’ Judy O’Grady
Are sisters under their skins!”

It was one of Kipling’s chief distinctions to have been able to see and feel romance without the aid of antiquity. He had no patience with antiquarian romanticism, and he satirised those who upheld the old against the new in “The King,” giving the laments of Cave-men and Lake-folk at the changes which were killing romance in their times, of the soldier who saw the death of romance in the substitution of the gun for the sword, and of the sailor who saw romance again disappearing when steam took the place of sails; and he brings us down to our own times with the modern season ticket-holder repining for the old romantic days of the stage coach, when--

“... all unseen
Romance brought up the nine-fifteen.
His hand was on the lever laid,
His oil-can soothed the worrying cranks,
His whistle waked the snowbound grade,
His foghorn cut the reeking banks;
By dock and deep and mine and mill
The Boy-god reckless laboured still!”

And this idea of romance he wove into all his finest work. He took things as he found them, the men who worked at manly crafts like soldiering and sailoring and engine-driving and, later, aviation, and showed us how fearful and wonderful were their days, turning what had hitherto been considered a humdrum modern world into an Arabian Night’s Entertainment. In many a tale he has made machinery speak as eloquently as Tommy Atkins or Mowgli, or Toomai of the Elephants. He has taken us out on to the banks of Newfoundland and shown us the hardness and joyousness of the cod fisheries and the way they have in the making of a man. And in the Jungle Books he has taken us into the wild, and woven a spell of romance more fascinating than the romantic life of men, and more natural than natural history. When he goes among the machines one feels that he loves them as his own “Stiff-necked, Glasgow beggar,” the engineer M’Andrews, loved them, and that the reply of the engineer to the passenger who had asked him, “Don’t you think steam spoils romance at sea?” would be Kipling’s own reply in the same circumstances, to those who failed to see the romance of the modern world:

“Darned ijit! I’d been doon that morn’ to see what ailed the
throws,
Manholin’, on my back--the cranks three inches off my nose.
Romance! Those first-class passengers they like it very well,
Printed an’ bound in little books; but why don’t poets tell?
I’m sick of all their quirks an’ turns--the loves an’ doves they
dream.
Lord, send a man like Robbie Burns to sing the Song o’ Steam!”

Rudyard Kipling did not wait, as we have seen, for someone else to fulfil this demand of his own creating. He stepped into the breach himself, and if not exactly as a new Burns singing the song of steam, as one who had vision enough to express that vision in a language strong to compel the attention of his fellow-men.

Kipling was far from inclined to rest after discovering nought common on the earth. He wanted to share this discovery with his fellow-men; and he wanted his compatriots to realise their obligations to an Empire which embraced so much of the good earth. Before him our poets were insular; they had no consciousness of Empire, or when they had they associated the Empire with England. Kipling took the opposite attitude--he associated England with the Empire. “What do they know of England who only England know?” he asked. And his question came at a moment when circumstances had made a hitherto indifferent people acutely conscious of the world-circling colonies their race had founded. At the Jubilee of 1887 they had been told that Queen Victoria reigned over an Empire upon which the sun never set. The image had filled the popular imagination. Gladstone’s failure to settle the Soudan, and his more recent attempt to give Ireland Home Rule, thus creating an illusion of Imperial dismemberment, had each contributed to the larger patriotism of Empire. So when Kitchener “avenged” the death of Gordon, and obliterated the failures of Wolseley in Egypt, by defeating the Mahdi at Omdurman, and retaking Khartoum, slumbering Imperialism awoke with a strange and arrogant light in its eyes.

The spark which eventually set the country ablaze with warlike patriotism was the Outlander question in the Transvaal, following the gold boom and the discovery of diamonds in South Africa. The great force in Cape Colony was Cecil Rhodes; he had gone there in the early Seventies as a young man, consolidated the diamond interests in the De Beers Company, worked at the early organisation of the gold industry, settled the native unrest in Matabeleland, Bechuanaland, Basutoland and Mashonaland, brought about unity of purpose between British and Dutch in the south, and founded the British South Africa Company, which was granted a royal charter in 1889, and whose vast realm is now known as Rhodesia. Rhodes was a man of action and a dreamer, a practical visionary, and from his early days in the colony he dreamt of a United South Africa, with railway and telegraphic communication from the Cape to Cairo. In 1890 he became Prime Minister of Cape Colony, and the events which followed this appointment were the final causes of that new patriotism of which Rudyard Kipling became the bard. Rhodes had been hampered in his schemes in the north by the national and non-progressive policy of Paul Kruger, President of the South African Republic, and Cape Town politics eventually centred around the question of the enfranchisement of British settlers in the Transvaal. Rhodes found a sympathetic supporter of his ideals in this country in Joseph Chamberlain, who had joined the Marquess of Salisbury’s ministry as Secretary of State for Colonial Affairs in 1895. Weary of political negotiations, the residents of Johannesburg were becoming restive, and they began arming themselves against Boer rule; and a climax was reached when, acting upon this knowledge, on the 29th December in the same year, Dr Jameson, the Administrator of Mashonaland, invaded the Transvaal with a small body of troops. He was defeated and captured, but the romantic side of the Jameson Raid appealed to popular sentiment and the new romance became the new patriotism. The sequel to the Raid was the Boer War (1899–1902), and the realisation of Cecil Rhodes’ dream of a United South Africa under the British flag.

Never before had this country been mixed up in a great issue which combined so inextricably the most sordid and the most exalted motives. Violent partisanship rent asunder the British people, and the pro-Boer campaign led by Lloyd George ended in riots. Cecil Rhodes became an ogre in the eyes of the Peace Party, whose members also looked upon Joseph Chamberlain as the political instrument of the ring of cosmopolitan financiers who controlled the South African mining industry. Even now it is impossible to separate finance from patriotism in that fierce struggle. Two things, however, seem certain: firstly, that Cecil Rhodes was not wholly inspired by sordid motives, and that he used his own wealth as much as he used the Rand financiers and British politicians, as instruments towards the realisation of an Imperial idea; and secondly, that Rudyard Kipling as prophet and bard of Empire was high above all pettiness, and inspired by a genuine romantic passion far removed from that jingoism which did nothing but add the verb “to maffick” to our language.

It was easier to mistake the gospel of Kipling, and the crowd did mistake it, because his most popular songs were set to a banjo melody. Before him bardic prophets had been content with the lyre; but with fine insolence he rejected that ancient instrument, and sought to inspire the most commonplace of all musical instruments with an exalted message. He saw in the banjo “the war-drum of the white man round the world.” But not all those who heard and liked his tunes realised their underlying demand upon character. They mistook his patriotism for jingoism, and he was forced to pray,

“Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet--
Lest we forget--lest we forget!”

They waved flags when he sang of Empire--but showed more inclination for cricket and football than for fighting or empire-building: and the banjo snapped out its derision of “the flannelled fools at the wicket” and “the muddied oafs at the goal”--

“Given to strong delusion, wholly believing a lie,
Ye saw that the land lay fenceless, and ye let the months go by
Waiting some easy wonder: hoping some saving sign--
Idle--openly idle--in the lee of the forespent Line.
Idle--except for your boasting--and what is your boasting worth
If ye grudge a year of service to the lordliest life on earth?”

Obviously Kipling and the man-in-the-street, who began to become a specially designated quantity at about this time, were at cross-purposes. There was an austerity about his demand which did not appeal to what he called “a poor little street-bred people.” Perhaps his song was a little foreign--as the Empire was a little foreign; and the masses were hardly prepared for his fierce Old Testament faith in a God of Battles and of Hosts. The people had his confident faith in their race. The Jews in Egypt were not more confident that they were the Chosen People. But our democracy did not want to prove their title; they were quite content to let others prove it for them or to take it on faith. Kipling narrowed down the Imperial idea to ancient tribal proportions plus conscription and the modern ideal of efficiency in organisation:

“Keep ye the Law--be swift in all obedience--
Clear the land of evil, drive the road and bridge the ford.
Make ye sure to each his own
That he reap where he hath sown;
By the peace among Our peoples let men know we serve the Lord!”

With this love of a modern and masterful people he associated the traditions of the race and its achievements in science and discovery and adventure; and particularly in that restlessness which had pitted the English against nature and barbarism in the ends of the earth: “there’s never a wave of all her waves but marks our English dead,” he sang. Not alone of successful enterprise of soldier or sailor does he sing; but he is fully conscious of the pioneer who makes tracks into the unknown without reward, favour or success; the

“... legion that never was ’listed,
That carries no colour or crest,
But split in a thousand detachments,
Is breaking the way for the rest.”

And his romanticism naturally takes under its wing the spirit of youth in its hunger for life; he loves all who respond to the call of the Red Gods and who dare to test their naked souls against the rough uncivilised world:

“Who hath smelt wood-smoke at twilight? Who hath heard the
birch-log burning?
Who is quick to read the noises of the night?
Let him follow with the others, for the Young Men’s feet are
turning
To the camps of proved desire and known delight!”

Rudyard Kipling’s song, whatever its immediate subject, is always the song of intrepid man. It is the revolt against book-culture and a fresh demand for the old culture of experience. He was not always rude in thought or form, and proved his power as a more conventional poet in “Sussex,” “The Flowers,” and in the most orthodox of all his poems he has come even nearer academic poetry in the expression of his own idea of human, and his own, worthiness:

“One stone the more swings to her place
In that dread Temple of Thy Worth--
It is enough that through Thy grace
I saw nought common on Thy earth.

Take not that vision from my ken;
Oh, whatsoe’er may spoil or speed,
Help me to need no aid from men
That I may help such men as need.”

And it is only natural also that the poem in his own manner which rises nearest to what we have come to regard as poetry is the “L’Envoi” to the _Barrack Room Ballads_, in which he sings of the return to the trail of “proved desire and known delight.” But there is little doubt that Kipling’s most original and inevitable verse is to be found in his soldier songs. These chanties of military life are unique, and in them he has transcended the art of effective dialect verse by turning slang into poetry. Such ballads as “Fuzzy-Wuzzy” and “Mandalay” are as peculiar in their way, and as separate from the rest of English poetry, as the designs of Aubrey Beardsley are separate things in English pictorial art.

Another class of verse Kipling also made his own: those verses into which he has put his more personal views upon questions of art and conduct. But in these, as well as in some of his more recent patriotic songs, although he has succeeded in achieving eloquent and vigorous expression, with, in addition, that piquancy which is peculiar to all his work, he has strayed furthest from the path of poetry. Sometimes he has fallen into verses which are incredibly lacking even in the most ordinary characteristics of poetry; and whatever one may find in such compositions as “The Conundrum of the Workshops,” “In the Neolithic Age,” “Cleared,” or “Tomlinson,” one only finds poetry by accident, as one finds it in prose. Still, among these are works which are their own reward, and in some of them their author has defended himself and his method of contravening the customs of polite art:

“Here’s my wisdom for your use, as I learned it where the moose
And the reindeer roared where Paris roars to-night:--
There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,
And--every--single--one--of--them--is--right.”

There is perhaps more in this sweeping assertion than art disputants will be ready to admit. However, the selective processes of time would seem to be on the side of Kipling, who has added another admission in justification of his methods in a familiar set of quaint verses introducing the second series of _Barrack Room Ballads_ in “The Seven Seas”:

“When ’Omer smote ’is bloomin’ lyre,
He’d ’eard men sing by land an’ sea;
An’ what he thought ’e might require,
’E went and took--the same as me!”

Rudyard Kipling has helped himself variedly at the tables of art and life, and it is not surprising, therefore, that he has produced unusual results. But strip from his output every weed, every unworthy production, and there will remain not one masterpiece, but a dozen, and in most branches of literature--novel, short story, ballad, lyric, dialogue and descriptive essay. And if his teaching at times seemed unnecessarily blatant it possessed an undercurrent of courageous wisdom as far removed from blatant jingoism as jingoism is from the Imperial or patriotic idea. Wonder was reborn in him; but it was not the wonder of childhood. It was the wonder of the grown man who had known and observed life and become illusion-proof--but wondered still and was thankful always:

“For to admire an’ for to see,
For to be’old this world so wide--
It never done no good to me,
But I can’t drop it if I tried!”

He can forgive all faults of passion or ambition; but he has no place in his system for the characterless nonentity who is neither good for something nor bad for anything. He has revealed the type in “Tomlinson,” and name and man have entered into our conception of life. This poet and visionary, who has helped by his song to weld a world-ring of colonies into an Empire, came into the Nineties telling people to have done with the gods of printed books and life by proxy--in short, to have done with anything in the nature of that Tomlinson who was not good enough for Heaven or bad enough for Hell, and who was finally rejected by the devil and sent back to earth with the admonition:

“Go back to Earth with a lip unsealed--go back with an open eye,
And carry my word to the Sons of Men or ever ye come to die:
That the sin they do by two and two they must pay for one by one--
And ... the God that you took from a printed book be with you,
Tomlinson!”